Gerhard Richter
[Artist, b. 1932, Dresden, lives in Düsseldorf.]
I had had enough of bloody painting, and painting from a photograph seemed to me the most moronic thing that anyone could do.
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Photography has almost no reality; it is almost a hundred percent picture. And painting always has reality...
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Photography altered ways of seeing and thinking. Photographs were regarded as true, paintings as artificial. The painted picture was no longer credible; its representation froze into immobility, because it was not authentic but invented.
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When I paint from a photograph, conscious thinking is eliminated. I don’t know what I am doing... The photograph has an abstraction of its own, which is not easy to see through.
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To be filled with an idea is the greatest thing that can happen to me. Otherwise one is just empty.
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I do not mean to attack anything at all. The most seemingly banal pictures are on the contrary the richest... A snapshot, when one conforms to it, becomes an extremely powerful factor... the family photo, with everyone well portrayed in the center of the image, is literally overflowing with life.
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I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings. (Because style is violent, and I am not violent.)
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I have taken an interest in photography because it illustrates reality so well.
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